IHES mathematicians honored at ICM 2022
Maryna Viazovska & Barry Mazur IHES

Several mathematicians related to IHES have been honored at the ICM 2022

The award ceremony of the International Union of Mathematicians held on July 5 in Helsinki honored several mathematicians who have, at some point or another, been related to the Institute.

The Fields Medal is considered the world’s most prestigious award in mathematics and is awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The four winners of this year’s Fields Medal announced today are Hugo Duminil-Copin, permanent professor at IHES and professor at the University of Geneva, Maryna Viazovska, professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, June Huh, Professor at Princeton University, and James Maynard, Professor at the University of Oxford.

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, a full professor at EPFL, where she holds the Chair of Arithmetic, was a post-doctoral researcher at IHES between 2012 and 2013. She also gave a series of six Hadamard lectures on automorphic forms and optimization in Euclidean space, organized by the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard at IHES in 2019. Prof. Viazovska solved the problem of compact packing of spheres in dimensions 8 and 24.

During the ceremony, other important prizes were awarded to scientists very close to the Institute. Most notably, Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University, was awarded the Chern Medal, given every four years “to an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics”. Barry Mazur’s close relationship with IHES dates back to 1962, when the Institute had just moved to Bois-Marie, in the South of Paris. His research interests include number theory and algebraic geometry. His profound contributions to these subjects have earned him many awards, and this medal is the culmination of a lifetime’s work.

Other scientists from the Institute were also honored at the International Conference held online on July 6-14. Laure Saint-Raymond, a tenured professor at IHES, and this year’s ICM plenary speaker, addressed the dynamics of dilute gases in her lecture on Saturday, July 9.
Ofer Gabber, CNRS research director at IHES, was an invited speaker and gave a talk entitled “Bounding the torsion in the l-adic cohomology of smooth projective varieties without unbounded searches” on Monday, July 11.

IHES warmly congratulates these mathematicians on these prestigious awards, which testify to the profound impact of their research.